The Data Blackout: How Big Tech is Suffocating Research into Disinformation The European Union's Digital Services Act (DSA), passed in 2023, aimed to give vetted academics access to proprietary data needed to study the spread of disinformation.
However, two years later, it's clear that Big Tech companies are blocking this access.
Adriana Iamnitchi, chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, and her team applied for access to TikTok's Application Programming Interface (API) under the DSA in October 2025.